PRAISE FORย GREEN HILL
In the poems inย Green Hill,ย Lorna Knowles Blake takes the intimacies of human life and the riots of nature and transmutes them into forms that both discipline and liberate their beauty. By doing so, she also reveals the real, the secret, sovereign of that beautyโthe human imagination, of which hers is a triumphant example.
โโโ โ Vijay Seshadri, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, author ofย 3 Sections
Whatever subject Lorna Knowles Blake turns her hand to, she displays a prosodic surefootedness and a continual freshness of perception. Poems as different from one another as โGlosaโ and โThe Allure of the Ledgeโ will find readers to admire not only Blakeโs skill but the literary culture that she makes her own.
โโโ โ Charles Martin, 2017 Able Muse Book Award judge, author ofย Future Perfect
Lorna Knowles Blake gives usย Green Hill,ย poems both dark and lightheartedly inventive, the craft casual, poisedโand audacious. Here, our twenty-first century Blake boldly converses with her nineteenth-century namesake, William Blake, as well as with Duke Ellington, St. John of the Cross, and others in musically dazzling poems set โfree to feel/ the hook, the dock, the sun, the real/ experience.โ What is the real experience? It is the sense of home. The title poem begins, โSo many ways to remember a house,โ and Blake means all abodes, from a hermit crabโs shell to a โrefugeeโs home/ the day after the raid.โ Relationships, too, become houses as Blake evokes moments of tenderness in a mature marriage and fears for the futureโthough in this deft, understatedly mythic book, the background world is still shades of green.
โโโ โ Molly Peacock, author ofย The Analyst
Moving and masterful, the poems in Lorna Knowles Blakeโsย Green Hillย donโt just reveal an exquisite formal sensibilityโthey conduct passionate and original meditations on our fundamental need for form. In poems about artwork and landscape, myth and love, Blake considers the ways we give shape and meaning to our lives. And her poems are themselves vital enactments of that same urge. American poetry is richer for this superb collection.
โโโ โ Peter Campion, author ofย El Dorado
ย Lorna Knowles Blake lives in New Orleans and Cape Cod. Her first poetry collection,ย Permanent Address,ย won the Richard Snyder Award and was published by Ashland University Press in 2008. She serves on the editorial board of the journalย Barrow Streetย and on the advisory board ofย Poetry Sunday, a weekly program of WCAI, Cape Codโs public radio station. Her poems, translations, essays, and reviews appear regularly in literary journals, both in print and online.
โโGreen Hillย was the winner of 2017 Able Muse Book Award.